Posted tagged ‘Pearl’

« ManicDDaily home page
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Pearl Cold and Old (Still Attending to Life’s Work)

November 27, 2010

 

Taking Pity on Pearl

My family has reminded me that our dog Pearl is over fifteen.  After doing the calculations, I could see they were right.  This shocked and saddened me.  I had convinced myself, and told others, that she was at least a year or two younger.  (In a similar way, I  have an increasingly hard time remembering, or acting, my own age.  It’s uncomfortable, on all kinds of levels, to feel time pass in one’s bones.  Almost as difficult to see it in others.)

We are celebrating Thanksgiving in Upstate New York, and Pearl is finding it very cold, both inside and out.   (I took pity on her above.)

Even so, she still enjoys the view from the porch.

 

Ah!

 

Though perhaps not as much as the kitchen.

On the Prowl

Some things never change.

 

 

Categories: dog, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Nanowrimo Update – Thanksgiving

November 25, 2010

Nanowrimo Participant At Thanksgiving (And Pearl)

Finally, a free day (well, putting aside chopping, cooking, washing dishes, socializing and trying to get some air!)

What I truly mean is that I am getting down to the wire with my Nanowrimo novel and I should focus today on upping the old word count.

(Nanowrimo, if you are new to this notion, is National Novel Writing Month–a time when would-be novelists/masochists devote themselves to their dream activity.  Sort of.)

The problem is that I suddenly can’t summon the will.

Is it Writers’ Block crashing down? The other side of the ManicD equation?  Simple fatigue?

Is it the fact that I find myself in the middle of a family gathering, with an expectation that I will do something other than work on my computer?

Is the old September NYT crossword at my side really so fascinating?

All of the above is true.

But, oddly, the main cause of my current withdrawal is a kind of success.  As I wrote a couple of days ago, I finally discovered the connection between the disparate characters in my nanowrimo novel, a connection that has some kind of emotional “rightness” (if not, resolution.)

This connection has taken the manuscript (the potential manuscript) to a whole different level.

All of this is good (I guess), but also daunting.   Suddenly, the proposed novel does not feel so much like a what-comes-next game, a free-fall through the unconscious, but a project.  Something that could be worthwhile if I could just devote about a year or more to it.

The coincidence of Thanksgiving brings me to the only helpful response I can come up with:  isn’t the human mind amazing?  All those nooks and crannies where stories, characters,types, lurk.   I readily admit that mine are all stolen–from life, reading, the heard, experienced; only somewhere in this dreamlike process of making one’s self write madly, a mishmash has occurred, a regrouping.

I don’t know if I will have the luck or drive or year (or so) that it will take to actually write the novel that started through this rather random exercise.   It’s another huge leap of faith to think that anyone will read it!   Still, something to be thankful for.

Categories: Nanowrimo
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Nanowrimo Update – The Saving Sidelong Glance – Tips For the Headlong

November 23, 2010

What's Going On There?

Like Pearl, I have great faith in the sidelong glance.

When her legs are working, she uses it mid-charge, mid-frolic.  It’s a feint.  She darts to one side and then another, then absolutely stops, her gaze fixed at an intense angle away, then whoosh, starts up again in what seems (to her, at least) an unanticipated direction.

When the legs are stiff, there’s the more passive sidelong glance.  This one that comes from the apparently resting Pearl, the glance that secretly watches the kitchen, always always always on the look-out for the opening of the fridge door, and then, for that distinctive swoop of cheese.

What I’m talking about here are ideas.  How to get them when novelling, especially when doing headlong unplanned novelling; when in other words, you are stalled.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a bit stuck in my “novel”; the bi-furcated plot refusing to “unfurcate,”  my two sets of characters on separate, unfeeling, trajectories–never, it seemed, would the twain meet.

And then, finally, yesterday having just passed through the old Helmsley building trying to shut out the sounds of UPS’s morphed version of “That’s Amore”, having just congratulated myself on my maturity for not checking my email when walking–I glanced it: the connection–closer than Kevin Bacon–and more importantly, with emotional heft.

I kept walking, not really daring to think–well, of course, I was thinking furiously–like Pearl darting around, but all the time also trying to keep my peripheral mental vision clear.

Sidelong ideas creep over the edges of consciousness unexpectedly,  the “eureka” moment often surprisingly off-point.

Tips:

  1. If you want an idea to swoop down, you have to leave an open runway, that is, a brain that is not actively digitalized.
  2. When I don’t want to just wait for an idea to just swoop down, I find it helpful to think of random images of characters, and especially, dialogue.  Yes, I do go through repeated plot possibilities, but these can have a very arbitrary feel.  I am more successful (or at least excited), when I just let myself hear characters talk.   Amazingly, all kinds of flashes of people and dialogue will arrive, which are somehow “writeable” even if I don’t know yet exactly how they will fit in.
  3. It is also helpful to give characters certain physical and vocal characteristics based on people I know, even if the characters are not really like these people.  (They grow farther and farther away as the story progresses.)
  4. The sidelong doesn’t really like the “headlong” – either the rush of the intensely driven, or the overly-cerebral.   Try to be a little less pragmatic with your characters; let them have a little space, wasted time.  (Don’t tell them you may cut all of that.)

Categories: Nanowrimo
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 2 Comments

Nanowrimo Update: The Quandary of the Corn Dog

November 21, 2010

Corn Dog?

Agh!  Everything changes.

Especially when you are writing a novel in a month.

Which brings me to being a Gemini (the sign of the twins, twins encapsulated in a single person).  I do not particularly believe in astrology as a means of foretelling the future–at least not since the big stock market crash in 2007 which was totally NOT foreseen by Jonathan Cainer.   Nonetheless, I have always found myself to be an absolute down-to-the-bone Gemini:  quick, shallow, communicative, changeable, inveterately bi-tasking.

The propensity to do two things at once is reflected consistently in my fiction writing.  Almost every manuscript I’ve ever written, whether for children or adults, tends to be told in two voices, the perspective of two characters.  I can’t somehow stick to one track; as a result, I’ve grown to like the kind of interchange that two different points of view, or even stories, provides.

But when you are writing a novel without much of a plan, and with limited imagination, this kind of structure can be a problem.  In my current nanowrimo manuscript, for example, one of my two subplots has become quite a bit more compelling than the other.  I just haven’t quite gotten the gist of the other one yet:  who are these people?  What are they doing with each other?

They started out in a suburban house in Sherman Oaks, California (part of LA).  The swimming pool went green; one decided to leave, the other tied her to a chair.  She has escaped now to a motel in Venice Beach.

But this move to Venice Beach really is too early in terms of the other subplot–that’s the crew traveling through Nevada, troubled by modern art (among other things.)

So what now?  While California girl is in Venice, she has to DO something.  She can’t just sit there awaiting the arrival of characters she’s never even met!  And, btw, I realized today, she is also  going to need a whole different past, and a whole different vocation, a basic remodeling.

So, once more, now what?  Do I just forget about California girl for a while, give up my typical back and forth, and focus on the guys in Nevada?  Do I go back and re-write California girl’s whole first half, move everything forward (or backward)?    This makes a certain sense, but would probably require me to give up whatever unconscious structure has happened in the initial writing.

Alternatively, do I come up with something new and exciting for California Girl to do right now?  At the moment, all I’ve been able to come up with is the eating of corn dogs.

(In case, you don’t know, these are hot dogs on a stick, dipped into corn meal, deep fried.)

Not somehow enough.

Categories: dog, Nanowrimo
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Nanowrimo Update (Pearl Anxious For Computer Credit)

November 20, 2010

Pearl (Not In A Chair) Urging Me Back To Computer

Hey, Guys!   Don’t think just because I’m not posting about it much that I’m not working on my Nanowrimo (National Writing Month) novel.

I am!

The problem is that, during the work week, I find it much easier to write the manuscript by hand.  This is going to be a big problem as the end of the month approaches and I need to upload my 50,000 words onto the Nanowrimo website to get credit.  (Remember–this project is not about writing a novel draft in a month, it’s about getting credit for writing the draft!  What’s the point if you are not some kind of “winner?”)

Whether I’ll get everything typed in time, I have to say that I am enjoying the process.

The novel involves two sub-plots–one of which is unfolding in Nevada right now, the other in Southern California.  The plots are supposed to blend together at some point, but each has gotten more and more delayed and unrelated to the other.  The people traveling in Nevada, for example, seem ready to have their plot’s crisis right there.  The girl in California has already been through a kind of crisis, without even knowledge of her Nevada brethren (who aren’t, of course, actually from Nevada but New York.)

Getting out of Nevada has taken so long that I’m probably going to skip Las Vegas completely.  (This is kind of dumb as Las Vegas and its environs are the only parts of Nevada I have even a vague sense of.)

And Bill, the character that California girl has just ditched, seemingly permanently, is one of the more colorful characters in the book.  (He tied California girl, who is not in fact from California, in a chair, then to a chair.  I won’t say what she did back.)

Hopefully, this weekend, Pearl and I can get back to the computer version.  (Pearl acts like she’s noncompetitive, but it’s really just a pose.)

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Pearl’s Weekend

November 14, 2010

The View's Not Great But It's Better Than Standing Room

Pearl seemed to have a very nice weekend.

Granted, she did not like being swung around tne New York City subway system, but the most important point at that stage of the proceedings was that she was in her bag and had not been left behind.

Her person, with the best of intentions, had stuck an old down jacket into the bottom of her bag, which made for good cushioning, but boy, was it hot Saturday morning.  Still, pretty soon, she was unzipped and riding along in a real train, one that clickety clacked overland, and that down cushioning below her belly felt pretty darn good.

Just in time, she got to experience a whole new blacktop–aaahh–and then, a car.   Pearl loves cars.

And, not long after that, grass!  Cold but lush, and uphill but lush, but uphill and more hill and hard for an old, stiff-legged, dog, until aahhhh,she was swooped up and carried again, into a room with carpeting and cheese and Christina!  Another one of her people–hey there!

More carrying, more bag, and more… carpeting.  She doesn’t know this exact carpeting, but she knows the type–it smells like shampoo and vacuum cleaner.   It is carpeting she must be careful of and very quiet upon.   Sssshhh!!!! her people hiss whenever she whines for their food.   (It really hadn’t been very much cheese…)

Then, whoa! a play!  Renanissance!  Her favorite.

Okay, so the view’s not so great from her bag, and those people in the seats just in front of her keep gabbing about some smell.  [Pearl’s 14 year-old breath has a certain je ne sais quoi.] But hey, it’s better than standing room.

Speaking of room, they sneak her back into the hotel again, only she’s too tired now to even think of making noise, no matter what they are eating.  (Which is Indian take-out–not a chance!)

The next morning, back in the car, on her person’s lap, the old down jacket wrapped loosely around her, the sun filtering in from the South where they are heading….home.

Mmmmm.

Categories: dog
Tags: , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Nanowrimo – Week 2 – Coasting Through the Bogs (Baths)

November 9, 2010

Would-be Coasting (Notice Book Is Read Rather Than Written)

Nanowrimo organizers warn that the second week of Nanowrimo is especially hard, the exuberance of the first week draining, the adrenalin of the oncoming finish not quite kicking in.

I figured these warnings didn’t apply to me;  after all. my first week wasn’t exactly exuberant.  No, now that I finally had my story, I would coast.

But when I got home from work last night, I had all kinds of non-coasting activities to attend do.

An idea for a blog!  Sure, I wasn’t going to actually write one, but get Pearl to help me.  That shouldn’t take long.  (Ahem.)

Then, well, I should really keep on exercising.  Since country music figures in the novel, I’d dance!  To Dolly Parton!  (Downloading some was a snap.)

OMG–look at you, Pearl!   Yes, it’s a bit cold tonight, but it’s not getting warmer.

Bathwater was run.  No point in a bath without a trim.

Then (I’m not completely heartless) came an hour of holding a shivering Pearl in a down parker next to a heater.

It was getting very late now, and I realized that the time for coasting was sliding down a very slippery slope.)

I would take my notebook into the bath.  (This is one of the best features of sore computer eyes.)

Oops, had to clean the tub.

Okay, so, I told myself, if you are not going to coast, you can at least be workmanlike.  (It’s true that maybe the bath is not the most workmanlike writing studio, but I did have an extra towel handy.)

I set down to writing the scene I had in mind.  Only the country music had put a bunch of other scenes in my mind.  Scenes from further along.

I set down to writing the scene that was supposed to come next.  Only I just couldn’t bear to write that scene–a kind of dinner party–and jumped straight to the after-party late night confrontation between an ancillary villain and one of my female protagonists.  I was going to fit some good (ancillary) character to help her out, not because I felt the young woman needed to be helped so much but because I had a great idea for a snipy kind of line that one of these ancillary characters might use against the villain.  (It involved the Dia Foundation!)

And finally set pen to page.  Only, as I wrote the scene, the dialogue was incredibly sweet, too sweet for the villain.

A couple pages in, I converted him to to one of my male protagonists. an important good guy.   (Who, unfortunately, would not refer to Dia.)

Oh well.

In the meantime, Pearl parked under the down parka, having had enough of Week 2.

And it's only Monday!

Categories: elephants, Nanowrimo, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Doing Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) Off the Computer – Writing by hand…errr… paw…

November 8, 2010

 

 

It can be hard to write in a notebook, once you've gotten used to a computer.

But it really can be done if you put your mind to it,

and sink in your teeth.

Categories: dog, Nanowrimo
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Nanowrimo – Morning Update – What next?

November 4, 2010

 

Pearl More Enthusiastic Than I am

I’m past 10,000 words and still hoping that my unconscious will supply a story line –you know, one of those things with beginning, middle, and end.  As it is, scenes shift, and something happens inbetween the shifts (the unwritten part), but little in the scenes themselves.  Is it all going to be background?  Random moods?

Granted, my focus has been very mixed.   I just have to hope that my unconscious works best when no one (i.e. me) is watching it too closely.

I don’t truly believe that this is the way interesting novels are written.   I’m a planner.  But then I tell myself to just try.    What do I have to lose?  Why not?  Who cares?   What the F?   Etc. etc. etc.

I’m concerned that all these questions are really a cover for….what’s next?

Categories: dog, Nanowrimo, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Pearl Gets Thoughtful About Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month)

November 3, 2010

Pearl Gets Thoughtful About Nanowrimo

Categories: dog, Nanowrimo, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »